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You can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist Histo

You can hear some particularly wild assertions like this in the long running commercial throughout the past few episodes of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast. They are formatted as conversation between Gladwell and an AT&T exec. It always starts with "what are some things that might be enabled if bandwidth improved and latency decreased" and then just jumps immediately to some Internet of Things utopia.

dmix 7y ago
I'd love to hear this, sounds cringey. Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this. https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning! It seems to have the same disconnect from the real world implementations that the AI sales hucksters are pushing, like those IBM Watson ads that were very obviously (to every programmer) being over sold to big businesses.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning! Reminds me of all the garbage that went around in the transition from AMPS to digital. I had a co-worker tell me her phone was better than mine because mine was only Edge, but hers was PCS! The AT&T guy should have put an "e" in front of it to tap the nostalgia for 90's marketing nonsense. eMachines, eBike, etailor, etc... People will love 5G because it's one more G than 4G. And then AT&T can call it's version 6Ge.
  - cookingrobot 7y ago
    Funny you say that - my AT&T phone currently shows that I’m using “5G E”, where the “E” apparently stands for “evolution”, which means while it’s not 5G speed yet it might become that fast in the future. It’s basically marketing fraud. https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/ https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/
    - dmix 7y ago
      The telecom companies got away with that the last (few) times so they are going to do it again in the future. Just like "4G+, 4GX, XLTE, LTE-A, VoLTE" Fortunately most people know not to take it too seriously or don't care either way. People typically only buy a phone when their last one dies so the sales pitch is usually between two very similar models in a store/website, with a possible up-sale for 5G (until 5G is standard). A small price bump because someone believed the sales guy's technobabble is not that big of a deal really, which is probably why there's no lawsuits unlike drug mislabeling. Which is different than people buying a whole new phone just because they heard about 5G, which is a small minority of early-adopters who are always getting burned by tech churn. Half or more product differentiations they think up for cell phones is mostly useless or quickly adopted everywhere. 95-99% of the UX will be the same thanks to the Android or iOS and highly competitive hardware specs.
- scottlegrand2 7y ago
  Clearly all it needs is a blockchain component to succeed.
_bxg1 7y ago
Decreasing latency seems more like a material improvement, but I wasn't aware 5G impacted that. Our current peak of bandwidth, on the other hand, is pretty much as much as you could need for any given media.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  5G does in fact have much lower latency than LTE, but that’s really not saying much.
- pas 7y ago
  5G impacts it because the high frequency parts need a lot more cells. Therefore the overall available airtime per user/device is goint waaay up. Which is good for low latency.

dmix 7y ago

I'd love to hear this, sounds cringey. Edit: weird it's a 3 short episode advertisement thing, a "live-read" ad in an interview format. These Pop science people are a great marketing/hype vector. I'm curious how much AT&T paid for this. https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/EccF6jR3CFo https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/n5AWdU75c1w https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU https://youtu.be/UKaIg102CAU The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning! It seems to have the same disconnect from the real world implementations that the AI sales hucksters are pushing, like those IBM Watson ads that were very obviously (to every programmer) being over sold to big businesses.

reaperducer 7y ago
The ATT guy said 5g will solve bike deaths by having your bike talk to the stop light and other cars, but with machine learning! Reminds me of all the garbage that went around in the transition from AMPS to digital. I had a co-worker tell me her phone was better than mine because mine was only Edge, but hers was PCS! The AT&T guy should have put an "e" in front of it to tap the nostalgia for 90's marketing nonsense. eMachines, eBike, etailor, etc... People will love 5G because it's one more G than 4G. And then AT&T can call it's version 6Ge.
- cookingrobot 7y ago
  Funny you say that - my AT&T phone currently shows that I’m using “5G E”, where the “E” apparently stands for “evolution”, which means while it’s not 5G speed yet it might become that fast in the future. It’s basically marketing fraud. https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/ https://www.heapooh.com/apple-iphones-5ge-att-network/
  - dmix 7y ago
    The telecom companies got away with that the last (few) times so they are going to do it again in the future. Just like "4G+, 4GX, XLTE, LTE-A, VoLTE" Fortunately most people know not to take it too seriously or don't care either way. People typically only buy a phone when their last one dies so the sales pitch is usually between two very similar models in a store/website, with a possible up-sale for 5G (until 5G is standard). A small price bump because someone believed the sales guy's technobabble is not that big of a deal really, which is probably why there's no lawsuits unlike drug mislabeling. Which is different than people buying a whole new phone just because they heard about 5G, which is a small minority of early-adopters who are always getting burned by tech churn. Half or more product differentiations they think up for cell phones is mostly useless or quickly adopted everywhere. 95-99% of the UX will be the same thanks to the Android or iOS and highly competitive hardware specs.
scottlegrand2 7y ago
Clearly all it needs is a blockchain component to succeed.

_bxg1 7y ago

Decreasing latency seems more like a material improvement, but I wasn't aware 5G impacted that. Our current peak of bandwidth, on the other hand, is pretty much as much as you could need for any given media.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
5G does in fact have much lower latency than LTE, but that’s really not saying much.
pas 7y ago
5G impacts it because the high frequency parts need a lot more cells. Therefore the overall available airtime per user/device is goint waaay up. Which is good for low latency.